Testing General Relativity with Supermassive Black Holes Using X-Ray Reflection Spectroscopy

• Main Authors: Askar B. Abdikamalov, Dimitry Ayzenberg, Cosimo Bambi, Sourabh Nampalliwar, Ashutosh Tripathi, Jelen Wong, Yerong Xu, Jinli Yan, Yunfeng Yan, Yuchan Yang
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2019-06-01
• Series: Proceedings
• Subjects: General Relativity; black holes; AGNs; X-ray reflection spectroscopy
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2504-3900/17/1/2
• ISSN: 2504-3900

In this paper, we review our current efforts to test General Relativity in the strong field regime by studying the reflection spectrum of supermassive black holes. So far we have analyzed 11 sources with observations of <i>NuSTAR</i>, <i>Suzaku</i>, <i>Swift</i>, and <i>XMM-Newton</i>. Our results are consistent with General Relativity, according to which the spacetime metric around astrophysical black holes should be well approximated by the Kerr solution. We discuss the systematic uncertainties in our model and we present a preliminary study on the impact of some of them on the measurement of the spacetime metric.